Immigration Arrests Up 30% In President Trump’s First Year

The Trump Administration first year of enforcing immigration laws saw a sharp rise of arrests.The numbers are nowhere near the Bush Administration last year numbers, but it does reverse the Obama Administration years of decline in arrests.

After declining precipitously since 2009, arrests made by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) rose 30 percent in the first full year of President Donald Trump’s administration, an analysis released Thursday by the Pew Research Center revealed.

ICE agents made a total of 143,470 arrests in fiscal year 2017, as compared against 110,104 in FY 2016. That number is the highest in three years, according to Pew’s analysis of the past nine years of ICE arrests.

That surge happened almost exclusively following Trump’s swearing in: Between Inauguration Day on January 20 and the end of the fiscal year on September 30, ICE made 42 percent more arrests than it did over the same period in FY 2016.

Although those numbers increased, they are still substantially down from FY 2009, when ICE arrested 297,898 people. Pew’s analysis shows that ICE arrests fell continuously over the course of President Barack Obama’s administration.